Title: Unnameable Loss : Melancholy And Postmodern Writing .

244Agata Wilczekparadoxically enough, writing which, according to Burton, is to have a thera‑peutic function and postpone melancholy, illustrates rather “the way melancholyspreads itself, stigmatizing and leaving traces in human imagination and body.Melancholy appears as writing whose operations are indelible.”20While revealing the ubiquitous nature of melancholy, Kristeva admits at thesame time that the melancholic imagination as a source of literary creativity turnsout to be particularly acute in “epochs of crisis,” such as our own times, whichare witnessing the collapse of all the political, social and moral ideals. “In timesof crisis,” writes the French theorist, “melancholy imposes itself, lays down itsarchaeology, produces its representations .”21 In the postmodern context mel‑ancholy occupies the space that is carved between the subject and the object bya question concerning the possibility of meaning; a space the postmodern writ‑ers have sought to fill with a storehouse of images constructed in their frequentlyshocking, but at the same time healing, writing. In the course of the subsequentanalysis I shall attempt to trace the link between melancholy and postmodernwriting through an exploration of this space and examination of some formal lit‑erary characteristics – enumeration, heterotopia, allegory, fragment, quotations,allusions or textual wanderings – which, as I intend to demonstrate, may be per‑ceived as constituents of postmodern aesthetics of melancholy.Overnaming: “the linguistic being of melancholy”Over the centuries melancholy has proven to be intrinsically ambiguous con‑cept, and its unstable, fleeting and inconsistent nature has eluded any attemptsat arriving at an ultimate, irrefutable definition of this phenomenon. The numer‑ous scholars who took a risk of making melancholy a subject of their investiga‑tions and provided a plethora of divergent, often mutually exclusive descriptions,nominations and meanings ascribed to melancholy, would certainly repeat afterJohn Donne: “if I were asked again, what is a vapour, I could not tell, it is soinsensible a thing, so neere nothing is that that reduces us to nothing.”22 LilianaBarczyk ‑Barakońska maintains that the vagueness pervading melancholy and itsinaccessibility to the senses make it particularly susceptible to utter annihilation;20 Liliana Barczyk ‑Barakońska, The Melancholy Discourse in the Baroque. A Reading of Rob‑ert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (Katowice: PARA, 2009), 13.21 Julia Kristeva, “On Melancholic Imagination,” in Postmodernism and Continental Phi‑losophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (New York: State University of New York Press,1988), 13.22 John Donne and Neil Rhodes, “12. Meditation,” in John Donne: Selected Prose, ed. NeilRhodes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 119.

Unnameable Loss: Melancholy and Postmodern Writing245yet there will always remain a narrow, unmeasurable line which would render itdetached from nothingness and would provoke further linguistic investigations:Dislocated into the language of “so neere nothing,” but still keeping itsdistance, melancholy regulates all attempts at approaching, circumscrib‑ing or formulating this almost negligible though irreducible distanceseparating it from nothing by creating a need for diversity of languag‑es, terms, idioms, contradictory even, required to evoke the otherwiseinarticulate distance. Melancholy generates a need for surplus, excess,profusion of names to mark its difference from nothing: it calls for ov‑ernaming.23Overnaming thus becomes a useful device of dealing with melancholy in thefield of language. However, we shall see as well that in the postmodern context itserves even more fundamental role as “the linguistic being of melancholy.”24In his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Wal‑ter Benjamin articulates his theological linguistics in which the fall of Adam andEve instituted the fall of language, the arbitrary split of signifier and signified.Since Adam was charged with naming the animals, he originally spoke the divinelanguage of names, which stood in an immediate relation to the creative Wordof God. There was no difference of word and thing, appearance and essence; itwas pure, transcendental speech. The Fall is the catastrophic end to this paradi‑siacal state of naming. It begins a descent into “the empty word, into the abyssof prattle”25 and spurs the multiplication of human languages, the profusion ofsigns. Things no longer have one name guaranteed by God, but many, based onconvention. Benjamin writes of postlapsarian – that is historical – nature: “Nowbegins its other muteness, which is what we mean by the ‘deep sadness of nature.’It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were endowedwith language.”26 The source of this sadness is fallen human language, which hasceased to be original and unique, in which name has already been “withered.” Inthe postlapsarian epoch, human beings continue to name things but they do soarbitrarily, without reference to the Word. Any relation between the name and theworld has been supplanted by a confusion of names, which, appearing in excess,achieve overprecision and, at the same time, inevitably fail to name the thing perse. The proliferation of human languages results in a multitude of names withthings being misnamed and “overnamed.” This is the source of their sorrow, for23 Barczyk ‑Barakońska, The Melancholy Discourse, 20.24 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Walter Ben‑jamin: Selected writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Marcus Bullock (USA:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 73.25 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 72.26 Ibid.

246Agata WilczekBenjamin perceives “overnaming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melan‑choly and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness.”27Although, as the example of Benjamin’s reflections shows, the question of theinadequacy of language, meaning and expression is not a new one, it has neverbefore gained such wide currency as in the postmodern times. The impossibilityof a fixed, clear meaning, the slippage of the signifier from the signified, and thefigurality of language that cuts across the entire process of verbal expression, con‑stitute a central theoretical project in the discourse of postmodernism, which atthe same time tells the story of a departure from traditional culture, the decline ofclassical metanarratives of legitimation, or the breakdown of the Western human‑ist heritage. Fredric Jameson, who has written extensively on postmodernism,often speaks of it as a cultural break. In Jameson’s reading, the Lacanian concep‑tion of schizophrenia as “a breakdown in the signifying chain” becomes a precisesimulacrum of this postmodern condition, a linguistic ‑psychoanalytic interpreta‑tion of the cultural break that characterizes the contemporary, postmodern andpoststructuralist, cultural scene. “When that relationship breaks down, when thelinks of the signifying chain snap,” says Jameson, “then we have schizophreniain the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.”28 Indeed, break andbreakdown seem to be the appropriate words for describing the postmodern con‑dition – a condition of fragmentation and fundamental discontinuity in cultureand in history. Separation of the language from the world opens up a wound,tearing, rupture, which the contemporary culture finds difficult to come to termswith. The postmodern literature being ushered in the idiom of loss, distance, dis‑ruption becomes evocative of melancholy. Longing to return to its innocent stateand mourning for the past wholeness, it attempts to restore the unity which hasfallen apart. Thus, the postmodern writers imitate, with “all” the possible words,the lost totality and coherence of the world, create illusions of the inviolate whole,which is already irretrievable, and hastily reconstruct the world in ornate depic‑tions, all ‑encompassing definitions, pseudo ‑epistemological metaphors, sayingsand proverbs expressing the universal laws of nature, but first and foremost in theimaginary collections of words created by the figure of enumeration.Enumeration, catalogue structures, lists are recurrent devices of the post‑modernist style. These contemporary forms of Benjamin’s overnaming endeav‑our to grasp eternity and infinity of things in the fictional infinity of words. Yet,they ineluctably bear the traces of loss. The never ‑ending sentences enumeratingcountless things and people eventually circulate only around itself, speak onlytheir own words, behind which there is invariably nothing. Brian McHale pin‑points the cause of this emptiness and meaninglessness of language in the fact27 Ibid., 73.28 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:Duke University Press, 1991), 26.

Unnameable Loss: Melancholy and Postmodern Writing247that the words listed in enumerations are detached from syntax. While analys‑ing catalogues from the ontological point of view, he observes that their nature isparadoxical, namely, they can “appear to assert the full presence of a world” and“seem to project a crowded world that defies our abilities to master it throughsyntax; the best we can do is to begin naming its many parts.” But it can also“have the opposite effect, that of evacuating language of presence, leaving onlya shell behind – a word ‑list, a mere exhibition of words.”29 For McHale, post‑modern catalogues tend to gravitate towards the pole of the word ‑list. What ismore, these are often hypertrophied lists or mock ‑Homeric catalogues, examplesbeing Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father orBorges’s short stories.What markedly differentiates postmodern enumerations from traditional lists,for example blazons – devices of classic or realist texts, which are used by RolandBarthes in S/Z to refer to the inventory, or the attempt to “capture” a predicate(Barthes uses the example of Beauty) through a systematic and exhaustive enu‑meration of its parts, attributes, characteristics30 – is their over ‑totality as wellas the confusing disorder, in which completely inappropriate things are linkedtogether. In The Dead Father Barthelme supplies the reader with a number ofblazons: the inventory of the musicians and animals slain by the Dead Father; theinventory of the progeny from the Dead Father’s affair with Tulla, the inventoryof the types of fathers.31 Barthes argues that “as a genre, the blazon expresses thebelief that a complete inventory can produce a total body, as if the extremity ofenumeration could devise a new category, that of totality.”32 But Barthelme’s listsare hardly classical:First he slew a snowshoe rabbit cleaving it in twain with a single blowand then he slew a spiny anteater and then he slew two rusty numbatsand then whirling the great blade round and round his head he slewa wallaby and a lemur and a trio of oukaris and a spider monkey anda common squid.33Here, the inventory is over ‑totalized; there is an information overload. Thislist draws attention to itself as simply that, a device; what is embodied in thispassage is not reality but discourse itself, its infinite lexicon. In the postmodernassemblages of associations words circulate chaotically around things and createthe space not for one essential meaning but the void which can be filled with any29 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 153.30 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 113–14.31 Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 11, 52–53, 36–37,136–37.32 Barthes, S/Z, 114.33 Barthelme, The Dead Father, 52.

248Agata Wilczekmeaning; words bombard things with its excess, torment them with their impre‑cision, overname and misname them.Related to this device is Barthelme’s treatment of the telling detail, the bit ofsuperfluous information that in the classic text serves to reinforce the mimeticeffect, linking the fiction to reality and validating the text. In The Dead Father,the significant detail is blatantly overdone, for instance, “Small gifts to the chil‑dren: a power motor, a Blendor.”34 It is so incredible, so absurd, that it serves tocountersignify; the material becomes simply the lexical. The detail’s incompatibil‑ity, its implausibility, its excess subvert the reality effect, rupturing the continuitybetween fictional and real worlds.This state of aesthetic incongruity may be even more aptly captured by the wordheteroclite, whose sense is explicated by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things:That word should be taken in its most literal, etymological sense: insuch a state, things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very differ‑ent from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residencefor them, to define a common locus beneath them all   . Heterotopiasare disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, theymake it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tanglecommon names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not onlythe syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparentsyntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite oneanother) to ‘hold together’ heterotopias (such as those to be found sooften in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest thevery possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths andsterilize the lyricism of our sentences.35The words in the postmodern texts remain in the perplexing disorder, empha‑sizing heterogeneity and separation of their locations (hetero ‑topoia). Disengage‑ment of words from syntax leads to the foregrounding of the ontological dif‑ference between the stratum of words and the stratum of the world. Words arecontours, seemingly empty, although interestingly shaped, containers that gainsignificance only by means of their relationship with other words on the page.They approach the status of objects in their own right, tangible things, havingno reference to the outer reality. By means of a repertoire of stylistic strategies,examples being lexical exhibitionism, introduction of words which are “rare,pedantic, archaic, neologistic, technical, foreign”; “back ‑broke” and invertebratesentences, “rambling, apparently interminable, shape ‑shifting constructions”; orheterotopian catalogues made up of fragments of a number of incommensurable34 Ibid., 17.35 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:Vintage Books, 1994), xvii–xviii.

Unnameable Loss: Melancholy and Postmodern Writing249orders,36 the reader is constantly alienated and distanced from the world, and leftfacing the empty words on the page.Litanies, catalogues, enumerations are laments over the world which hasbeen reduced to an assemblage of incoherent membra disiecta, a heap of dis‑crete fragments, impossible to be linked together into one logic whole. Disap‑pearance of a higher sense, destruction of this metatextual (metaphysical) syntaxresults in illegibility of the world which has become an unclear mosaic, wherenothing speaks but everything only leans towards diffusion of sense. The beingsare irreducibly disintegrated not by any inner decay of matter and its mortalitybut by enigma of the uniting principles of the world. Since reality has ceased tobe a book to be deciphered and the problem of the meaning of the world hasbecome insoluble, melancholy rhetoric of loss suppresses any phenomenology orhermeneutics and can at most indulge in “the only pleasure melancholic permitshimself ”37: allegory.Allegory as the Ruinous Language of Melancholy“Allegory” derives etymologically from the Greek allegoria which literallymeans “to speak otherwise” (from allos, other, and agorein, to speak).38 Itbecame immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages and into the age ofthe Enlightenment in a more satirical form (e.g. Gulliver’s Travels), finally los‑ing favour with the rise of realism and Romanticism until its resurgence in themodern era. At its simplest, allegory may be understood as a figure of speechin which an element or object comes to signify or stand for something else.Gold as an object or a colour, for instance, might be used to represent wealth.This process of signification may be subject to proliferation, and thus allegoryemerges as a complex trope. Depending upon the context, gold can also, orinstead, signify nobility, purity, beauty, pomp and splendour, ostentation, arti‑fice, decadence, greed, or the vanity of earthly riches. As the example demon‑strates, allegory may, as referents multiply, suddenly reverse direction to act asthe negation of its other possible meanings. Walter Benjamin notes that withinallegory “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anythingelse.”3936 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 151–56.37 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London andNew York: Verso, 2003), 185.38 Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, eds., Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (Londonand New York: Routledge, 2005), 6–7.39 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 175.

250Agata WilczekIn his attempt to appreciate the richness of allegory as a mode of expres‑sion, Benjamin, a key thinker in the allegory revival, juxtaposes it with a symbol,whose supposed merits were privileged and elevated by the nineteenth ‑centurycommentators. Whereas the meaning of an allegory depends upon an oscilla‑tion between two discrete terms, the power of a symbol resides in the unity andimmediacy with which it expresses an idea. The full meaning of the symbol hasto do with the connection between the material thing (word, image, or other) andthe metaphysical idea to which the thing refers. The result of this unifying con‑nection is that, as the mind comes to a comprehension of what is being symbol‑ized, the material thing itself disappears into the greater idea beyond the thing.The meaning of a symbol is not dispersed across a plethora of disparate referents,but is concentrated intensively in a single image as a “momentary totality.”40 Full,complete, self ‑contained, the symbol encapsulates the virtues of clarity, brev‑ity, grace and beauty, so much extolled by Romantic writers. Benjamin quotes,among many others, Friedrich Creuzer’s eulogy of the symbol: “it is like the sud‑den appearance of a ghost, or a flash of lightning which illuminates the darknight. It is a force which seizes hold of our entire being .”41 Overlapping withthe universal as well as uniting essence with appearance, the sym

At the close of Black Sun, Kristeva emphasizes the great power of the con‑ cept of melancholia: while the psychological‑literary syndrome of melancholy is articulated, transformed, or suppressed by the textual swings of cultural history, melancholy itself remains “essential and